d themselves obliged little by little to
abandon their pedantic resolve to restore the Treaty of Berlin. Sir
Robert Morier, British ambassador at St. Petersburg, in a letter of
December 27, 1885, to Sir William White, thus commented on the causes
that assured success to the Bulgarian cause:

The very great prudence shown by Lord Salisbury, and the
consummate ability with which you played your part, have made
it a successful game; but the one crowning good fortune,
which we mainly owe to the incalculable folly of the Servian
attack, has been that Prince Alexander's generalship and the
fighting capacities of his soldiers have placed our rival
action [his own and that of Sir W. White] in perfect harmony
with the crushing logic of fact. The rivalry is thus
completely swamped in the bit of cosmic work so successfully
accomplished. A State has been evolved out of the protoplasm
of Balkan chaos.

Sir Robert Morier finally stated that if Sir William White succeeded in
building up an independent Bulgaria friendly to Roumania, he would have
achieved the greatest feat of diplomacy since Sir James Hudson's
statesmanlike moves at Turin in the critical months of 1859-60 gained
for England a more influential position in Italy than France had secured
by her aid in the campaign of Solferino. The praise is overstrained,
inasmuch as it leaves out of count the statecraft of Bismarck in the
years 1863-64 and 1869-70; but certainly among the _peaceful_ triumphs
of recent years that of Sir William White must rank very high.

If, however, we examine the inner cause of the success of the diplomacy
of Hudson and White we must assign it in part to the mistakes of the
liberating Powers, France and Russia. Napoleon III., by requiring the
cession of Savoy and Nice, and by revealing his design to Gallicise the
Italian Peninsula, speedily succeeded in alienating the Italians. The
action of Russia, in compelling Bulgaria to give up the Dobrudscha as an
equivalent to the part of Bessarabia which she took from Roumania, also
strained the sense of gratitude of those peoples; and the conduct of
Muscovite agents in Bulgaria provoked in that Principality feelings
bitterer than those which the Italians felt at the loss of Savoy and
Nice. So true is it that in public as in private life the manner in
which a wrong is inflicted counts for more than the wrong itself. It was
on this sense of resentment (mis